It's Aug. 28 and Joe Calabrese is playing tour guide. As he's been doing several times a month since the HealthLine opened in October 2008, the general manager of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority has a microphone in his hand.
He's ticking off the specs of the $850,000 HealthLine vehicle he's standing in to a group of seven Australian transit officials seated on plush blue seats.
The Aussies, like transit officials from Nashville, Tenn.; Albuquerque, N.M.; and elsewhere, have come to town to see what all the HealthLine fuss is about. Cleveland is one of several stops on the group's U.S. tour following a transit convention in Las Vegas.
As Mr. Calabrese describes the 63-foot-long, bend-in-the-middle vehicle, he points out that, despite its rubber wheels, it's a bit like a subway car. It has doors left and right — five in all — so passengers can board on either side, depending on the station configuration, and it offers level entry — especially important for wheelchairs — from elevated platforms.
Bigger than a standard bus, it carries 100 passengers -— 47 seated, 53 standing — and is powered by a hybrid diesel-electric motor. Because of computer-timed lights, it moves up and down Euclid Avenue faster than a bus, shaving 12 minutes off the 32-minute bus ride from Public Square to University Circle.
As Mr. Calabrese signals the operator, the vehicle moves off for a trip up Euclid Avenue.
Earlier, in a training room at RTA headquarters on West Sixth Street in Cleveland, Mr. Calabrese briefed the group on the history of the $200 million HealthLine and the thinking behind its creation. The line, he said, was from its beginnings in the 1980s seen as more than just a transit line.
“(Civic leaders) wanted connectivity to the major institutions along the corridor,” he said. “What was most important to the community, however, was economic development.”

A long road

Indeed, developer Fred Geis said the transit project “gave companies a focal point for everyone to steer toward.”
Mr. Geis is part of family-owned Geis Cos. and a principal in Hemingway Development Corp. of Streetsboro, which is developing MidTown Tech Park, a multi-building research/incubator complex at 6700 Euclid.
Estimates of the construction and development under way or planned over the next few years along the Euclid Avenue corridor top $6.3 billion, and the new line also is succeeding in boosting transit ridership along Euclid.
Planners began to think about linking the city's two major employment centers — downtown and University Circle — in the early 1970s.
A 1972 study by the Cleveland/ Seven County Transportation/Land Use Study, the predecessor of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, a regional planning organization, maps out a “Euclid Transit Corridor” between downtown Cleveland and University Circle. Well-known urban planner Lawrence Halprin picked up on the concept in his 1975 city master plan, the so-called Halprin Study, commissioned by the Cleveland Foundation.
A decade later, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority and NOACA in a 1982 study identified the Euclid corridor as the part of town most in need of transportation improvements and gave a name that stuck for a decade — the “Dual Hub Corridor.”

A different route

A more comprehensive study by the city planning department in 1985 proposed several options, including a rail line that would include a short subway section that surfaced at the edge of downtown for a street-car-like run to University Circle.
RTA and the city for several years sought federal money for a $600 million subway/rail line. But the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) wouldn't go for it. So planners turned to a new concept gaining acceptance in Europe and South America — the bus-rapid transit, a rubber-wheeled vehicle that used city streets but operated more like a street car.
The community wanted something more than a prosaic bus line, since the goal was putting young professionals, who would be working at high-tech or biomedical businesses, in the seats.
“But we wanted something as rail-like as possible,” Mr. Calabrese told the Australians. “Something fast, simple, safe and first class.”
In addition to the transit improvements, however, community leaders saw the need for the physical rebuilding of the streets and sidewalks. An even higher priority was the desire to build something that would spur new development of abandoned properties and the renovation of aging buildings.
The total cost of the plan accepted by the FTA was $200 million, with at least $50 million going for streetscape improvements — everything from new pavement and sidewalks to new lighting and even artist-designed trash cans. The utilities took the happenstance of torn-up streets to upgrade telephone, fiber-optic, water and sewer lines.
That extensive roadway rebuilding may have been the only downside to the project — it tore up sidewalks and sections of pavement sometimes for months, hurting retail businesses along Euclid and inconveniencing drivers and pedestrians.

"As good as we've seen'

Joe Marinucci, president and CEO, Downtown Cleveland Alliance, said the public's sometimes negative reaction to construction of the HealthLine and its long-term disruption of Euclid surprised him.
“It really showed us how important Euclid is to the community,” he said.
The HealthLine name itself is an indicator of the impact the line is having. In spring 2008, shortly before what was then being called the Silver Line was to open, the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals, the two major health care institutions along the line, paid RTA for naming rights.
The two hospitals agreed to pay a total of $6.25 million over 25 years to brand the line.
The international Institute for Transportation & Development Policy last year put the HealthLine at the top of its list of U.S. bus-rapid transit systems. The organization, which advocates for environmentally sound transportation planning worldwide, cheered the use of off-board fare collection, the smart use of dedicated bus lanes, center-road transit stations and platform boarding, which allows wheelchairs to enter and exit without special equipment.
That kind of transit industry and urban planning praise is what brought the Australians to Cleveland, and it's what brings transit officials to town several times a month.
“Across the board, we're looking at a whole variety of systems,” said Michael Apps, executive director of Australia's Bus Industry Confederation after his tour. “This is as good as we've seen, if not the best.”